The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  The port, seemingly ruined for all time only weeks before, was actually shipping cotton—slowly and occasionally at first, but then at higher and higher volumes. The U.S. Weather Bureau office in the Levy Building was up and running, with new instruments installed on the roof. The rail bridge to the mainland was rebuilt, and trains were crossing Galveston Bay.

  It’s true that all of this progress went on amid continued desolation. The trolley started running long before all the bodies had been removed and burned. The tracks were cleared; trolley cars brought passengers past mountains of debris still fetid with corpses. The pyres kept burning, night and day.

  For temporary living quarters, the army supplied tents. They now lined the beach, thickly erected in long rows, a sprawling encampment of white canvas. Soon there were hundreds of tents housing workers helping with relief and clearing as well as many homeless Galvestonians. Visitors began calling Galveston’s growing tent community “the white city on the beach.”

  There was a hospital tent for the beach community. There were kitchen and dining room tents. Rabbi Cohen had taken over food service for the homeless; he personally oversaw all the cooking.

  It would be many months before all of those tents would be struck. Thanks to Clara Barton’s insistence on quick house building, however, many people were able to leave the beach before winter.

  And many people, of course, left Galveston for good.

  Still, it had become clear very quickly that the city would once again defy expectations. Galveston would survive, rebuild, go on. This was an island that few, in the early days of white conquest and settlement, would have called a good spot to establish a city. And yet a city had grown here, and it had become one of the greatest in a rising nation. The spirit that built Galveston would now rebuild it.

  So there was a kind of double-edged sword involved. The same rugged mood of cavalier defiance—typically Texan, quintessentially American—that had played a role in making Galveston tragically vulnerable to disaster now played a role in helping its surviving citizens come back, amazingly quickly, from the terrors they’d experienced. This was a tough, vital, and resilient people. Chastened by disaster, overcome by grief, daunted by horrifying logistics, they nevertheless began to plan ahead.

  Repair of the wharves and the rebuilding of the harbor were so swift that investment money didn’t instantly flee the island, as many had initially feared. Ordinary people, meanwhile—those with homes left to repair—got busy renovating them.

  Ed and Annie McCullough went to work cleaning up the mud-filled home of the white man who had taken them in. Cassie Bristol, so downcast that Sunday morning by the ruined condition of her boardinghouse—her family’s livelihood—did what she’d always done, ever since her husband had died at sea so long ago: she rolled up her sleeves and got to work.

  “Here goes more mortgage,” Cassie told her kids. Little Louise and her older sister, Lois, were wearing used clothing, donated for Galveston relief by people far away. Lois didn’t like hers because it looked just like Louise’s. Cassie went back into debt to rebuild her home and business. But she had regained confidence that her children wouldn’t fall into poverty. She fought back.

  With all that rebuilding going on—big, like the harbor infrastructure; small, like people’s houses—the men of Galveston’s Deep Water Committee began looking ahead. They were considering dire issues that went far beyond cleanup and rebuilding.

  If Galveston was to have a realistic chance at a future once corpses were disposed of, debris removed, streets disinfected, and houses rebuilt, even more monumental tasks would have to be faced.

  Denial was now at an end. Galveston lay at sea level. Disaster could strike again at any time. The city needed protection.

  With that realization came a strange new period, both in the recovery effort and in the life of the island city as a whole. Galveston would again defy expectations and astonish the nation and the world.

  The engineer Colonel Henry Martyn Robert, late of the Army Corps of Engineers and author of Robert’s Rules of Order, had helped oversee the dredging of the harbor that had made Galveston one of the world’s great ports. Back then, Robert had recommended building not a full-fledged seawall on land but merely a breakwater, just offshore, to break up waves as they approached the beach. Even that modest idea had been rejected in the happy days when Galveston chose to remain ignorant of danger.

  Now, amid the devastation caused by the great gulf hurricane, Colonel Robert was ready to offer the commission an even bolder recommendation. He was joined in his study of the Galveston situation by two other great American engineers: Alfred Noble, who had built a breakwater on the Chicago lakefront; and H. C. Ripley, designer of Galveston’s wagon bridge to the mainland. These three developed a powerful plan.

  The heroic age of big engineering was just getting underway. Given the disaster that had now occurred, these men weren’t about to hold back. Here was an opportunity to think bigger than almost anyone had ever thought before.

  When Robert and his team came before Galveston’s new government, the city’s leadership had changed form. With the cleanup and disposal, the emergency committee had disbanded—but the Texas legislature had approved a revised city charter for Galveston creating a “government by commission.”

  Instead of twelve alderman debating every issue, a five-member board now put each member in charge of an entire area of city government. This was another Galveston “first.” Other cities throughout the nation, from Houston to Boston, would soon follow suit.

  The new Galveston commission set up shop not at City Hall, but in a building at Twentieth and Market. There the board heard proposals from Robert and the other two great engineers for how to protect Galveston from future rages of nature.

  Robert and his colleagues laid out something truly ambitious. Galveston needed not a breakwater in the gulf but a seawall on land, they told the commission.

  Made of cement, the wall must run three miles along the gulf beach, and it must rise a full seventeen feet above sea level. That would hold back high waves, rising floods, and devastating storm surges of any future hurricanes.

  A challenging proposal. Breakwaters, standing out in the water to slow and fracture waves, are one thing. A seventeen-foot wall, running along the beach itself—that’s something else. There was an audacity to it, a defiance in deciding to simply shove nature back, with hard cement, at great heights, designed and crafted by modern technological prowess.

  The seawall project had an aura of heady, inspiring confidence. This was a twentieth-century idea, a plan for a new kind of American future.

  And yet the engineers went even farther. Recommending a long, high seawall to hold back the gulf was only the beginning. They also proposed something more astonishing and harder to achieve.

  Galveston Island should be standing higher than sea level—despite the fact that a major modern city, only now beginning to recover from devastation, was already sitting on top of it.

  This plan was truly audacious. And so was its budget. The engineers estimated the combined projects at $3.5 million (nearly $90 million today). Galveston, meanwhile, was broke. It was already defaulting on its bonds. No civic engineering feat exactly like this one had ever been tried before. Any plan to pick up a city and raise an island had many strikes against it.

  None of that daunted Galveston’s city government. While the commission leaders started wrangling tax breaks out of the Texas legislature, hawking a new bond issue to investors who were initially skeptical, and making big shows of putting up their own money, J. M. O’Rourke Construction of Denver, Colorado, began working on the project, following Colonel Robert’s detailed and pioneering specifications.

  They couldn’t just start building the seawall. Preparations were a critical part of this project—and that meant undertaking a series of big projects within the biggest project.

  Just to get building materials to the seawall site at the beach, special rail tracks had to be laid thr
ough town. By October 1902, those rails were bringing materials—which had been delivered to the island also by rail, across the bay—downtown to the beach: thousands of carloads of crushed granite, sand, cement, timber pilings, granite blocks, reinforcing steel.

  At the building site along the beach, four steam pile drivers, going all at once, banged the pilings deep into the ground. The pilings were topped with planks four feet thick. And this was just the wall’s foundation.

  Giant wooden forms were then erected in sections sixty feet long. From rails that ran along their tops, men poured these high forms full of cement. Steel rods went into the wet cement every three feet. Once the cement had set, the forms were broken away, revealing a smooth face of high hard wall, steel-reinforced.

  To prevent undermining by tides, big granite blocks and boulders were set at the toe of the wall, extending nearly thirty feet into the gulf. On the landward side, granite and gravel filled in the wall’s back, giving Galveston a new, high streetscape. Soon an embankment one hundred feet wide would run nearly level with the top of the wall.

  The entire three-mile run of wall proposed by Robert and his engineering team was completed in just sixteen months. Galveston, no longer lying on the beach and open to the gulf, now had a cement seawall to prevent the worst effects of hurricanes.

  People came to marvel at the construction. For the thing really did soar. Robert had designed it to curve radically, tapering as it rose from the beach. The wall showed the sea a concave face capable of tossing the highest waves back on themselves.

  That sweeping white-gray form reaching toward the big Gulf Coast sky combined with its stark utilitarian purpose to make the Galveston Seawall an engineering feat to rival the ancient Wonders of the World, at once a classical fortification and a monument of austere modernism. Along its broad, granite-capped top, people dwarfed by its massive proportions bicycled, strolled, and gazed out over the great gulf toward the horizon.

  Meanwhile, the really ambitious part of the project had also begun. It was time to lift up the city. Colonel Robert’s engineering team had identified a 500-block area to be elevated.

  Lifting a city wasn’t completely unheard of. Parts of Chicago had been elevated in the middle of the nineteenth century to improve drainage and prevent infectious disease.

  Still, ratcheting up many hundreds of buildings, some of them mansions, churches, schools, and office buildings, required overwhelming confidence, grand vision, and a detailed knowledge of large-scale engineering technology. For Galveston needed not only raising up but also careful sloping.

  The grade at the gulf beach on the south side of town was to be set very high, nearly level with the top of the seawall. That would put the streetscape there high above the gulf. Then the grade would start running downhill, northward toward the harbor. That would direct into the bay any water that made it over the seawall.

  At the beach, therefore, the island needed to go up nearly eighteen feet. Toward the bay it had to rise only about eight.

  The job also required immense patience on the part of the engineers and the many workmen who made it happen—and of all of the citizens of Galveston. The idea was to elevate every building within the 500-block area, from small shacks to grand mansions to high stone public buildings. Each building would have to rise painstakingly slowly, pushed up by jacks a quarter inch at a time, until it reached the desired height. Then the buildings would sit on stilts—temporarily—and wooden boardwalks would enable people to get around while literally tons of sand were filled in below the buildings, creating the new, higher grade.

  The streets themselves would also have to be opened up, of course. Gas lines and pipes underneath would be lifted, the streets then repaved at the higher grade level. Trolley tracks had to be removed from the streets first to be reinstalled when the pavement went back down at the higher grade.

  It would take years of almost unbelievable civic disruption to accomplish the lifting of Galveston. At the inception of the plan, it would have been hard to believe that this whole thing could ever really happen.

  And yet it was accomplished. The planners thought the plan through; then they executed it. One of the most crucial early realizations was that a project this big could only be carried out in discrete pieces, one area at a time. Galveston was lifted in rectangular sections.

  Wooden dikes were laid out to define a big rectangle of the city. All the buildings in that section were slowly jacked up in preparation for the raising of the ground and supported by the stilts. Everything within that section was now to be shored up on new sand and settled down on its new grade. Streets in that area would also be lifted and then repaved. Then a new section would be laid out with the wooden dikes, and the same procedure would begin there.

  One of the biggest issues the planners faced—along with lifting up entire buildings with jackscrews—was how to get more than 16 million cubic yards of sand under those raised-up buildings. The first question was where the sand should come from. The answer, the commission determined, was to dredge sand out of the shipping channel in the harbor. It always needed dredging anyway; this plan killed two birds with one stone.

  So three dredging ships, built in Germany, were brought into the bay. But bringing sand into town meant disrupting the city even further. The dredgers would have to travel down a wide canal, cut right through the middle of town, running from the harbor on the north side almost all the way south to the beach.

  So Galveston went ahead and dug that canal. Houses that stood in the canal’s path were removed; the plan was to return the houses once the job was over and the canal refilled. When it was completed, the waterway was 200 feet wide, 20 feet deep, and more than 3 miles long. It also had two wide turning basins—cutting even farther into the streetscape—to allow the dredgers to circle and head back to the bay for more sand.

  Putting a canal through a city requires further building, for traffic still has to move across town. If a canal was going to temporarily divide Galveston, a new drawbridge had to span it.

  So that bridge too was quickly built. The city that had become unrecognizable on September 9, 1900, was cleaned up now. Yet as it began a process of being lifted, section by section, Galveston would remain hard to recognize for years to come.

  Getting all the dredged sand under the lifted buildings represented another massive challenge. With the canal finally cut and operating and a traffic drawbridge spanning it, the three big German dredgers, loaded with tons of sand from the bay channel, started making daily trips out of the bay, down the canal, and into the city.

  Once on the canal, a dredger would approach the big marked-out section of town contained within wooden dikes. All of the buildings in that section would have been jacked up, ready. People were still living in them: hence the improvised wooden boardwalks, already in place.

  The dredger would anchor at a discharge station. There, a big pipe, forty-six inches in diameter, lay on a wooden gangplank that crossed the canal at the dredger’s deck level.

  Men on the dredger began pumping the ship’s load—a slurry blend of sand and water—into the pipe. The mixture traveled quickly through the pipe, shot with force into a series of further pipes that branched out well below the jacked-up buildings on stilts. The pipes spread throughout the entire designated section of town.

  As people watched from their windows and from the boardwalks, slurry pumped from the dredgers in the canal came blasting out of those pipes. It flowed into the empty spaces under the buildings, filling the space and leveling itself.

  The sand from the slurry then lay there in a deep, flat pile, settling as it dried. The water from the slurry leached back into the canal and flowed back toward the bay. It might take load after load of slurry, pumped from the anchored dredges and roaring out of the pipes, to get an entire section of city filled in, eighteen feet high in some places.

  But once that sand had risen high enough, there was a new grade. The nature of the island itself—essentially always a sandbar—had b
een altered. Section by section, the island had become higher.

  The houses on it, having been raised, were now level with the new ground. The boardwalks could be removed, as could the dikes containing the section of town.

  The dredgers then started bringing sand to another section. They began pumping the slurry in there.

  Not surprisingly, this process didn’t always go perfectly. Kids liked to run past the spewing pipes and get covered with muck. When drying, the slurry stank; it drew flies. People slogged across the mud on wood planks and cut through other people’s houses to get where they were going. Horse-drawn road traffic backed up at the drawbridge—and the bridge closed at 9:00 P.M. Trees and plants were buried deep in the salty, sterile sand; they died by the thousands.

  St. Patrick’s Church weighed six million pounds. It had to go up five feet. That took 700 jackscrews; the Moody mansion on Broadway took 300.

  The canal that the city had dug for the dredgers kept refilling with silt. It too had to be dredged.

  And paying for all of this immense effort and bizarre inconvenience fell unequally on the citizens. The city covered moving and restoring houses that had been sitting in the path of the canal. Other homeowners, however, had to pay out of their own pockets to raise their houses. If they didn’t, the city could condemn the property and then either lift up the building at its own expense or simply demolish it.

  And yet there were few complaints, no defaults, virtually no condemnations of property. As amazing as the engineering effort itself, the cooperation of the citizens of Galveston in a long, tedious, messy, and gargantuan effort to protect their city for the future gave testament to the horrific memory of what they’d gone through in September 1900.

  That intense civic commitment reflected a new realism. People on the narrow little island were finally facing up to something they’d long denied: vulnerability to disaster. In doing so, they showed continued faith in the ability of humankind to devise solutions to terrifying problems, to make sacrifices in the service of implementing ambitious plans, and to manage an unpredictable future.